A Particular Kind of Black Man

June 3, 2019
Folarin’s tender, cunning debut begins as a realistic story of a boy coming of age in Utah in the 1980s, then slides into a subtle meditation on the unreliability of memory. Tunde, the older son of parents who emigrated from Nigeria, who is five years old when the novel opens, lives in a small town in Northern Utah where he is made to feel like an outsider. His hard-working father is frustrated because he can’t hold a job equal to his abilities, and his mentally ill mother frequently breaks down and physically abuses Tunde. When she leaves the family and returns home, Tunde’s father goes to Nigeria and brings back a “new mom,” who has two children of her own whom she prefers to her stepchildren. After a move to Texas, the narrator is accepted by Morehouse College, where he realizes to his alarm that he is experiencing “double memories” and is seeing “things I could have done as if I had done them,” which causes him to re-write the version of the past by which the reader has come to know him. Only when he visits Nigeria does “reality click into place.” Folarin pulls off the crafty trick of simultaneously bringing scenes to sharp life and undercutting their reliability, and evokes the complexities of life as a second-generation African-American in simple, vivid prose. Foralin’s debut is canny and electrifying.
Agent: Maria Massie, Massie & McQuilkin.

Narrator Prentice Onayemi's soft tones and introspective style highlight the inner turmoil and confusion felt by Tunde Akinola, a first-generation Nigerian-American boy who is trying to make sense of his fractured world. Throughout his childhood, Tunde struggles with loneliness, family instability, and establishing a sense of self, just as his immigrant father struggles to find work that suits his skills and respects his ethnicity. Onayemi's delivery captures Tunde's changing perspective as the boy matures from a 6-year-old who is sometimes afraid of his schizophrenic mother, to an adolescent who is trying to get used to a new mother and stepbrothers, and to a 17-year-old college freshman who is worried about his own mental health. Onayemi successfully employs various accents to distinguish the varied English-language skills of Tunde's family. C.B.L. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine